Eating Badly Might Lead to Alzheimer's

Here’s yet another good reason to eat healthy: new studies have found that Alzheimer’s might be directly linked to insulin resistance, a condition often brought on by poor diet that often results in Type 2 diabetes.

The latest issue of British magazine New Scientist took a look at the recent studies in an article called “Eat Your Way to Dementia,” and its findings are almost as bad as that headline makes it sound. The new research found that insulin, which we commonly associate with regulating blood glucose, also regulates neurotransmitters linked to memory and learning. Insulin resistance kicks in when your body’s insulin production goes haywire, sometimes spiking, sometimes dropping off, all of which can cause your cells–including brain cells, we now know–to become less sensitive to insulin.

When this happens in the brain, as researchers found when inducing the condition in mice, toxic proteins accumulate and dissolve the connections between neurons. This leads to dementia, and, eventually, the advanced dementia of Alzheimer’s. The link isn’t clear cut and predictable, and more research needs to be done, but it has been seen to exist. And, since Type 2 diabetes rates have tripled in the US since 1980, according to New Scientist, we could be in for a tidal wave of Alzheimer’s as our diabetic population ages.

The development of insulin resistance is most clearly connected with a high-fat, high-sugar (including as carbohydrate) diet, and often goes along with obesity, though the relationship to weight problems is still somewhat of a chicken-or-egg question. Either way, just eating what you know is good for you is a way to avoid it: eat your fruits and veggies, skimp on the sugary drinks, don’t make fast food a habit–things we all know but still sometimes forget.

One bright spot in all this terrifying research, though, is that some of the correlation between high-sugar and high-fat diets and insulin resistance can be weakened by eating more omega-3 fatty acids. Unfortunately, other studies have found that the typical North American diet is low in omega-3s, meaning the population at large might be even more vulnerable to insulin resistance and its consequences.